The Sunday Scaries
Volume 1, Number 41
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror

The Red-eye

Even as we were boarding there was an atmosphere. The gate staff weren’t chatty. Even the TVs seemed mumbly. The pilot’s announcements were curt, the safety drills perfunctory. We took off almost in silence.
           Smooth weather. After we pierced the clouds the night sky was icily clear. The moon was nearly full, and beneath us the clouds hung seemingly unmoving, a desert of grainless sand dunes, silver and white, soft as a down comforter, hard as stale meringue.
          They handed out drinks and snacks. Some of us were crying a little, we couldn’t have said why. The only whispers were those of the attendants, but they talked too quietly for us to hear. Gossip probably, nothing for us to bother about. A little girl near the back was watching Bluey on her tablet, but when she dropped it on the floor she didn’t try to pick it back up again.
          Some of us slept. One man snored a little, and it was a human sound, so comforting that when he jerked awake, sweating and rolling his eyes, we begged him to fall asleep again.
          The pilot announced that we were twenty minutes out from Denver.
          If you looked outside, and you didn’t want to look at the moon, as we didn’t, you imagined something within the clouds, something enormous that stretched its limbs all the way to the horizon, just under the heavy white sea, rippling slowly here, pressing upward, relaxing down again. Just on the edge of sight, it seemed to breach cover for a moment, something dark and imbricated, keeping pace with the plane.
          We were to land soon, we were told. It may have been imagination, but the plane seemed reluctant to sink below those clouds, lowering hesitantly only to rise back up and gird itself to try again. When we did go down, the darkly white of it all wrapped us and held us close and it was a long time before it ruefully let us go.
          Below us the earth was black as outer space, with only a few frantic stars still lit.
          The pilot said something. We were coming in to land, but then a strange sharp noise came over the intercom and the plane bucked upward like a frightened horse. We slid back upwards into the endless cloud.
          Denver wasn’t there. Colorado wasn’t there.
💀